Krutilla's legacy: Twenty-first-century challenges for environmental economics

Few people have influenced environmental economics more than John. It has now been fifteen years since his last major book was published (Bowes and Krutilla), and early forty years since the article, "Conservation Reconsidered," that most environmental economists associate with him, appeared in the AER. This article revisits John's ideas in two areas. The first considers his arguments for existence values as a legitimate component of the benefits derived from public decisions for environmental assets. The second describes how he demonstrated that physical, economic, and institutional sources of interdependence alter the way benefit-cost analyses should be developed.